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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
 |
| Temporal Paradox | ||
| The paradoxical idea that making changes in the past results in changes in the present. |
As far as I know, this is the first use of the phrase, but not the concept. See the Vibranium Wall time machine from Ancestral Voices (1933) by Nat Schachner.
| "Don’t you think it would have been simpler just to send him back in time through a temporal displacer?”
Packer shook his head vehemently. "Not on your life. Our research teams that have been investigating the various problems of time travel and temporal paradox are very strict on that kind of thing. They’ve proved, statistically and definitely, that vast changes could be made to out present by even the slightest of alterations in the past..." |
| Technovelgy from The Toy,
by Brian Berry. Published by Planet Stories in 1954 Additional resources -
|
This is also called the "Grandfather Paradox"; probably the first (if a bit roundabout) use was in a letter in Wonder Stories October, 1932:
Contrast with the Dutch clock from what is probably the first time-travel science fiction story, The Clock That Went Backward (1881) by Edward Page Mitchell.
“A Flight into Super-Time” by Clark Ashton Smith is of the type that avoids scientific explanations (so that we can’t catch them up, if they make any errors) and merely uses the time machine as a medium to show us his ideas of the bizarre life that he imagines may exist on other worlds. Not that I’m knocking his stories (they really are entertaining), but I would like a little science mixed in with the imagination. On one point, I must congratu- late Mr. Smith — he is one of the few who have realized that if one travels in time, he would not remain stationary relative to the earth, but would stay in the same spot in space, while the sun (with the earth following) departed, until the machine were shut off. This would remove the killing-of-grandfather paradox.
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